Spiceworks Help Desk can help you cut down on the chaos. Setup email in Spiceworks to allow end-users to create their own tickets and stay informed about updates to their tickets. Spiceworks turns emails into tickets, and will send email notifications to users when updates are made to their tickets.

4 Steps total

Step 1: Give the gift of email

Your Spiceworks installation needs its very own mailbox to function properly.

Step 2: Setup Spiceworks to rule its new mailbox

Login to Spiceworks and click Settings > Email Settings. This is where you'll configure Spiceworks to access and monitor its new mailbox on your mail server.

You can typically configure the form just like you would configure any mail client - provide the SMTP/IMAP settings, or if you have an Exchange server you can use the Exchange option. SMTP/IMAP is your best bet because it should work with any mail server, including Exchange. Check the screenshot for an example.

Click [Save] and you should see an on-screen confirmation that the settings are good, and receive a test email to your personal mailbox (whichever email address you used to login to Spiceworks).

Step 3: Try it out - create a new ticket

Awesome - your Help Desk is live! Send an email to the mailbox you created in step 1. Within a few minutes you should see a new ticket appear in the Help Desk.

Pro tip: To speed it up you can click [Refresh Tickets] while viewing the Help Desk to check for new emails immediately.

Sending another email from an /end-user's/ email address is an even better test. End-users will receive a notification email from the Help Desk with information about their new ticket, and can in turn reply to the email to add new comments to their ticket.

Step 4: Roll it out to your users

One last thing to do - roll out the new process to your users.

If you have emails waiting for you in your own Inbox you can forward them to the Help Desk mailbox to turn the emails into new tickets, and start working from within the Help Desk.

An announcement email to your end-users can also help transition them from contacting you directly to instead opening a ticket in the Help Desk (via email!).

Enforcing the "create a ticket!" rule can be tough, but you'll get there!

Setting up email is one of the easiest ways to get started with the Spiceworks Help Desk. If you have any problems getting setup, we can help!

Everyone on our support team is an email expert, and support is free! (no, really!) Post up in the Support Forum or email us at support@spiceworks.com to get some help.

You can also use the Spiceworks User Portal to allow users to interact with their tickets, or create new ones, right from a browser. The User Portal is a customizable web portal that comes built-in to Spiceworks.